Business processes may be important to the functioning of an organization. A business process may be a collection of related, structured activities and/or tasks that produce a specific service or product for a number of customers and/or markets. A business process may begin with a customer's desire and, hopefully, end with the fulfillment of that desire. Activities of a business process may affect the bottom line of an organization, thus monitoring the business process may be beneficial in providing feedback to enable optimization of the business process.
A business process may span multiple applications and may flow across multiple subdivisions of an organization using diverse hardware and/or software to implement the applications. For instance, a business maintaining an online store may include a telecommunications subdivision including employees and/or applications for order receipt and processing and a supply chain subdivision including employees and/or applications for producing and/or distributing a product to fulfill the orders.
A business application may include hardware and/or software to facilitate business activities. For instance, a business may have an electronic inventory system, an electronic order processing system, on online store, among other business applications. Business applications may be instrumented to monitor a business process using point-products but this does not guarantee full coverage and tracking due to the diverse nature of applications and a lack of monitoring products to track all business processes.